Your accent

[Piff paff puff]

Hate mine and hyper aware of it for certain reasons

 

[Be More Pacific]

I don’t hate my accent but a lot of people point it out to me. I’m from Stoke and so people pick up on the little ways I say things like look and book. We also say things like duck, shug, conna and ayup orate! Which can be like a different language! I don’t hate my accent but I think it sounds kind of funny at times. But I love it at work when I hear another Stokie- makes me feel comfy and at home. If I could chose an accent to have it would probably be Southern Ireland or some sort of Italian accent I think. I wouldn’t chose Stokie!!

It is very unique and yes, it is like a different language at times. I can spot a Stoke accent a mile off. I lived there for a few years and, to my ear, it's like a combination of the Liverpool, Birmingham and Nottingham accents with words from the Potteries dialect thrown in. Truth be told, I found it really fucking bizarre when I first moved there and, despite my best efforts, I did pick it up a little and I can still hear it now on certain words - for example, when I say 'salad', it comes out more like "salid". But I made some amazing Stokie friends and I don't regret living there at all. The people are what make Stoke on Trent

My accent is very transient and I tend to end up picking up a little bit of the accent from wherever I live although it's still predominantly a North West accent (where I'm from orginally) that gets stronger when I see my family according to my partner. I live in the South now.

I think I'm pretty good with guessing regional accents from years of speaking to people on the phone and watching The Jeremy Kyle Show (actually not a joke) My partner has lived in several places and yet you wouldn't be able to guess any of them at all. He says it's a "good BBC accent" - I would just say "posh"

 

[Itsallaboutmememe]

Mines Yorkshire which wasn’t a problem when I lived there but I met a southerner and moved to the midlands

nobody ever has a clue what I’m saying!

we did ‘hook a duck’ at work once

they made me go round asking people if they wanted a go

the problem was,that in a busy restaurant with a lot of noise people thought I was saying ‘fuck a duck’

we ended up doing a lucky dip instead…

as my boss pointed out,even I couldn’t bugger that one up!

my fella never understands what the hell it is I’m saying-I often have to say it really slowly so he catches on-I don’t say my ‘H’s’

he loves it when I say ‘hitlers house has an hoover’ as I say it ‘itilers Ouse as an hooovvveeerrr’ or ‘a hungry horse as a hangover’ turns into ‘a ungry oss as a angover’

I’ll be at work and nobody understands when I say ‘owt else needs doing?’

many’s the time they’ve thought I’m taking the pis when I’m really not

in all I love my accent-just a shame it causes much confusion

 

[Misbehaving]

I have very conflicted views on my accent my family are all yorkshire born and bred but both my parents have quite soft spoken mild accents then they spilt up and i moved to fairly run down part of teeside and thats the accent i,m stuck with despite only living there about 10 years and then moving to london where i,ve been about 20 years now.
To tell the truth my accent alienated me and made me feel like a bit of an outcast.
Its hard to be so different and i was young and lonely and then a new mother with no family and i became very self conscious almost paranoid.The horrible thing is when you feel like that people pick up on it and it only makes things worse.I felt rejected from the wealthy mothers because i was working class and a bit defensive maybe i looked a bit hard faced and i,d find them being polite but keeping me at a distance the only other mothers were either immigrants or londoners born and bred and the thing that i most noticed was that in london everyone seems to stick to their groups almost tribal but i had no group to belong to!
Its natural isn,t it to want to belong to a community or stay with similar people but i felt out on a limb.
Plus i,m introverted by nature and in the end i just shut down a bit and didn,t really initiate conversation with people for fear that they would already have a prejudice about me and that i,d only confirm it.
Can i just say because its seldom really talked about but women with a working class accent are i feel heavily discriminated against i know the reverse is true as well i find myself either freezing or fawning(and i hate myself for it) when i hear what seems like for a better word a posh accent.
I find britain to be very heavily segregated and riddled not only by class prejudice but by colour gender and economics.
When the chips are down and things are not going well this can be pretty devastating sometimes.Life here is very insular and hermit like being indoors a lot(the weather does not help!) Chances for socialisation are rare unless you go to the pub or are out on the prowl looking for fleeting fun!
The things i enjoyed doing were all things i could do alone (cinema,art galleries,museum) So i did everything myself or with my kids and thats the point i want to make accents show where you are from but they don,t show who you are! Also any accent can be percieved in a negative or positive light but some accents have more clout than others because they convey privilege and a sense of wealth.
Now wealth is not just money but status,health aspirations and to a certain degree confidence. When you feel poor and others reinforce this it can put you on a doward spiral of low self esteem frustration antagonism and even despair.
I strongly believe that no one should be mocked,ridiculed mimicked or talked down to because of the sound of their voice.
Fuck that its not banter and its passive aggresive and its putting people in what we think are their places (what arrogance is that to presume that you know where someone belongs.So i decided to come out of the woodwork and to stop feeling deprived and that only i would decide if i belonged or was accepted or not.
I cannot be jocular to have irony you need to feel secure and i never did to come from the poorest part of england was hard but its given me an edge i can also empathise with other lost souls who like me never felt as if they belonged anywhere either and i have compassion for the marginalised and the rejected and i know its not fake virtue signalling because i,ve been there too.
So yeah accents are great bullshit detectors because anyone who judges you negatively because of them are showing themselves to be unworthy of your attention and not deserving of your time or energy.

 

[xlaurenmarie]

Scottish/Glaswegian. I have my “phone voice” which is the toned down version for people from other places but the rest of the time when around other Weegies my accent is rough af and you probably wouldn’t understand a word

me too hahah right down to the phone voice, or in my case Scottish person living in England/mild Glasgow uni accent! I live in Liverpool now so I do have a slight twang but you can always tell when I've been to see my mum, it takes a few days for me to not sound like Jade Jackson

 

[Mulholland Drive]

I was born in South Africa, but moved to England in my late teens. And have been hopping between the two ever since.

However I still carry a rather heavy Afrikaans accent mixed with a mild sprinkling of East Anglian English. So whenever I'm in Johannesburg or here in England I have to repeat myself because people find it hard to understand me first time round

 

[ClockworkDolly]

I am French and have been living in Birmingham for the past 5 years. My ex boyfriend was from the Black Country so I have developed an accent that is a mix of French/Brummie/Black Country. it is very confusing for people who meet me

I would love to hear that mixture.

I have an Essex accent, but I do not articulate myself the way you hear them speak on TOWIE. Unfortunately that programme has reinforced the stereotype of Essex people “being stupid” even more so.

I love our broad range of accents in Britain. I must admit, I am good at mimicking accents and find myself doing it rather a lot, usually when by myself. But I’ve often put on a different accent when visiting a place that I have no intention of returning to, just to see if I can get away with it.

The thing with accents is that it does not matter what your accent is, it is how you articulate yourself, the speed in which you speak too. I never have a problem understanding accents, but if someone is a fast talker, then that would make it slightly more difficult to understand them.

 

[JLXRD]

I have a Dorset accent but compared to older people in Dorset it is very faint (a lot less farmer-like the older people sound like in Hot Fuzz here!)

My grandparents are from Dublin and I would love to have their accent, I think it sounds so lovely and find it quite calming!

 

[Freebies_come2me]

Absolutely love a scouse accent! Sounds so friendly and warm to me.

I've lived in the UK for almost a decade now, but think that I still have a very strong South African accent, although I often am mistaken for being from Australia or NZ. Funnily enough, when I do go back to SA on holiday, everyone thinks I'm a tourist.

I love a SA accent!! I often mistaken it for Kiwi

 

[Annie101]

My husband is also South African (we're both from PE) but has been in the UK for 16 years and has pretty much lost his SA accent. Someone once asked us why my husband doesn't have an accent, but I sound so "severe".

Port Elizabeth girl here too

 

[TravellingPants]

Generic estuary / Home Counties southern accent here... grew up in Essex, with a fairly strong twang that had the edges rounded off by living on the South coast for uni, where my friends were predominantly from upper middle-class/private school backgrounds. I remember coming home from my first term at Christmas and my oldest friend asking why I’d started talking funny. People now rarely guess where I’m from other than somewhere in the south.

My ‘original’ accent comes out stronger with family or friends from home, or after a few drinks!

 

[F the dust.]

I'm broad cumbrian..awful. would love an Irish or north east accent!

 

[Very traditional]

My Grandmother is from South Africa. Lived in London for many many years but still has quite an accent. We always thought it funny to get her to say “Ice cream”

My friend is from South Africa but has lived in the Uk for nearly 20 years, in Wales for most of it. Her accent is still there but much less so than when we first met and she now has a bit of a Welsh twang. When we're drunk we always ask her to say blanket and hill as we love how she says them!

i've got a welsh accent (south west, not valleys strong or anything) and i don't mind it - hate listening to it on a recording but it seems to go over well with people, i guess it's a friendly accent? My favourite accent is Southern Irish, it's such a pleasant sound but i quite like Northern Irish too.

i love how accents change depending on who you're talking to - my friend from Essex has a fairly neutral accent day to day as hasn't lived there for years but put her in a room with her mum and it's so broad it's unbelievable!

 

[F the dust.]

Should I feel sorry for you?

My friend also mentions something called "Uppies and Downies", which I think is some kind of ball game played between people from Workington and Whitehaven (great rivals apparently). She loves to get involved as there's barely any rules, but looks quite chaotic, lol

Never seen it but they do usually do a local news segment on it on our local news

 

[1001 others]

I absolutely adore Irish accents - they needn't change a thing in my view

 

[Penelope Strawberry]

I grew up in Liverpool, and have spent most of my adult life on the Wirral.
I like to think that my scouse accent is quite soft, but I am probably kidding myself. Whenever I travel out of the north west, it often creates amusement. Taxi drivers and bar staff, will frequently repeat what I have just said - in a comical, over the top scouse accent. Perhaps that is how I actually sound?
It must be bad, as I once asked a local for directions, as I left London Bridge Tube Station. He replied “I’m sorry love, I don’t speak German”

Absolutely love a scouse accent! Sounds so friendly and warm to me.

I've lived in the UK for almost a decade now, but think that I still have a very strong South African accent, although I often am mistaken for being from Australia or NZ. Funnily enough, when I do go back to SA on holiday, everyone thinks I'm a tourist.

 

[PoleStar]

I am Berkshire born and bred, never lived anywhere else. The old Berkshire accent doesn't really exist anymore and I don't have it. I don’t have any strong feelings about my accent, it's quite soft and that's about it.

 

[Practically Perfect]

I am the female version of Peter Kay/Paddy McGuiness and I loathe it.

 

[SpookyLumberjack]

I'm from Liverpool (and happy to be) but after studying and living away for a while my accent is now RP (never had the strongest scouse accent and trained at a theatre school and lost it a lot more, taught abroad for a long time and what was left apparently just vanished). I moved back not too long ago and everyone assumes I'm from London. I correct them but hilariously people don't always believe me. I get ripped off on taxi journeys all the time (they always ask on the way where down south I'm from and get shocked when I start directing them the right way). It never happens when I put the accent on - yeah I've tested it.

Been called a posh bitch a couple of times by random chav girls on buses (asked them not to smoke lmao)

I get told I'm 'not a scouser' a lot now too. Whatever (don't get me wrong, people here are generally nice so it seems I encounter all the gits).

 

[Mulholland Drive]

I'm broad cumbrian..awful. would love an Irish or north east accent!

A friend of mine lives in Workington, and to be honest I can barely understand her once she's in full flow!

Needed explanations for words like "Lal", "jam eater", "hesta" and "scrattin" among many others!